CHICAGO (Reuters) - Treating high blood pressure in the
very elderly can help reduce the risk of fatal strokes and
other heart problems, British researchers said on Monday.

They said the finding sheds light on the benefits of
offering treatment for hypertension among people over 80, a
group that is often overlooked in medical studies.

"Our results clearly show that many patients aged 80 and
over could benefit greatly from treatment. Populations are
living longer and we have growing numbers of people living well
into their 80s and beyond, so this is good news," said Dr.
Christopher Bulpitt of the Imperial College London, who
presented his findings at a meeting of the American College of
Cardiology in Chicago.

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Bulpitt and colleagues studied 3,845 patients in their 80s
with persistent high blood pressure. Half were treated with a
diuretic or a placebo. Doctors added a drug in the ACE
inhibitor class or a placebo for patients who needed more drugs
to reach their blood pressure targets.

They found that very elderly patients whose hypertension
was treated with a diuretic, with or without the ACE inhibitor,
had a reduced risk of death from stroke and death from any
cause.

"An unexpected finding of our trial is the reduction in the
risk of death from any cause with active treatment, making
(this study) one of the few individual studies of hypertension
showing benefits of blood-pressure reduction on mortality,"
Bulpitt and colleagues wrote in the study, which was published
in the New England Journal of Medicine.